Coaches, Come Clean!

The author of Girl, Wash Your Face will need more than soap and water to get the dirt off right now; she might need a full body car wash. Last week we learned that Rachel Hollis, best-selling author, coach and motivational speaker, who built a business sharing her “authentic” self turns out to have been ‘talking the talk’ way more than she was ‘walking the walk.' I am not here to gratuitously criticize Hollis or coaches in general, but I want to highlight what is happening with her as a way to address authenticity and accountability in the industry. After dispensing marriage advice via her social media and sold-out conferences, she and her business partner slash husband David Hollis announced they were getting divorced, he was leaving the Hollis Co. and they had been struggling to keep their marriage together for years, while teaching others how to maintain marital bliss. 

Many women who had paid to learn their happy union secrets felt duped, and took to social media to say so. Then, a video Hollis made talking about the “sweet woman who cleans her toilets” in a white woman privileged kind of way went viral, and she went from popular girl to pariah overnight (in the same video she compared herself to WOC icons like Harriet Tubman, Oprah and Malala Yousafzai). 

What came next is what, to my eyes, totally covered her in schmutz. Instead of apologizing, Hollis got mad at the women criticizing her and blamed her team for not handling the crisis correctly. 

As a mindset and scaling coach, I watch what happens between coaches and their followers with more than a bystander’s interest. Why can’t coaches take criticism and figure out where we too need help? Why can’t we practice the same humility we ask of our clients? For people who have built a career around making sure others see their short-comings, we need to be able to do the same. We need to be intentionally and boldly authentic and not get distracted by influencer culture or chasing dollars, likes and followers. 

The Hollis story reminded me of another fall from grace that hit closer to home. I had not been following Hollis, but I did spend a few years enamored of a different larger than life coach: Tony Robbins. When multiple accusations against Tony Robbins for making unwanted sexual advances and insensitive remarks to a female sexual assault survivor started surfacing, I thought back to one of his four-day retreats I went to. On the one hand, I was in awe of his charisma, ability to coach anyone on the spot and spend 15 hours on stage without a break or drop in energy. I learned so much from him in those retreats. One of my friends I went there with whispered to me after his fifth or sixth hour on stage, “He is like a demi-god!” We were all thinking some version of the same.

But at that same conference, and at others I attended, Robbins and his team made comments about women that were so outdated and sexist that I became disenchanted. For example, one of his key presenters gave the example of how it feels when you are buying a car. And then said, “Or ladies, like when you are going shopping for a purse” as though no woman has ever bought a car before! And each day started with scantily clad cheerleader-like dancers bouncing around on stage. I know Tony Robbins was raised during a time when women were not seen as the peers and powerhouses we are now. I can cut him a tiny bit of slack for that. I know guys from his same generation who say dated and un-evolved things, but I can always call them on it (like when they say, “I had a business meeting with this girl” and I ask, “Was she sixteen? Because if she was older than sixteen, she was probably a woman, not a girl.”). But here is what I don't feel I can forgive… why didn’t Tony Robbins create a culture in his company where women on his team could tell him not to talk about women or objectify women the way he did? Even if he doesn’t fully get it, he could amend his ways. I am 100% certain there were smart, evolved women in his inner circle who were cringing and could have told him that some of his actions and remarks were off-putting at least, and offensive at worst. But that must not have been part of his company culture.

Here is the point. It’s a privilege to be a coach. You are leading, you are de facto a role model, and you have a space in public life that you can use as a springboard for positive social change. Or which you can abuse. Coaches have to do better.  

I’d love to see a kind of “Coaches Code of Conduct” for this industry that is sometimes lacking in basic authenticity.

The Coaches Code would include these five pillars:

1)  Be open to criticism and create a culture where your team or the people who follow you can tell you what’s up.

2)  Be authentic (meaning don’t teach something if you don’t live it yourself)

3)  Get knowledgeable about racism, classism, sexism and ageism (no hiding behind “I don’t see race” or “I didn’t mean it that way.”)

4)  Do the work to understand how you can be an ally and change agent

5)  Don’t blame your team and own up to your mistakes. Take full responsibility for whatever happens under your name whether on social media or at one of your events.

Coaching at its best is not about you, it’s about your clients. Coaches should not "block" people on social media (Hollis purportedly blocked a lot of people who criticized her on social media) and when they screw up, they should own up. Another coach, Marie Forleo, was in the spotlight in 2020 after she and her team removed posts made by members of one of her Facebook group on topics surrounding race and privilege. She owned up to it, and as The Center for Respectful Leadership writes, “The fallout from this occurrence led to much self-examination, and update in policies and training for employees, and a lengthy full apology made by Marie herself on behalf of her organization and their previous policies.” [1] I do not believe people should be “canceled” when their apologies are genuine and authentic. If someone is willing to evolve and own their mistakes, it’s important to give them a second chance. 

As a coach, I try to own my privilege as a white woman who went to an Ivy league college and benefitted from growing up around a lot of people with wealth. Although I was raised by a single mom, got scholarships to go to the schools I attended and worked three jobs to pay my way, I still benefitted from white privilege. Today, I don’t always “get it right” when speaking about race and class, but I am dedicated to keep learning, to elevating the voices of WOC in my community and to having the tough conversations. I want to “meet in the middle” where people want to co-create what success looks like for all of us, as Tyler Perry urged when he accepted his humanitarian award at the Oscars this year (see here if you missed it).

Do you also think coaches can do better? I‘d like to see a world where coaches take their responsibility to be authentic and an ally as seriously as they take their marketing funnels, and are willing to be less like gurus and more like servant leaders. Gurus are about themselves. Gurus get out their step stools and jump up on a pedestal. Leaders, especially servant leaders, have the humility to know they can be great at one thing and still need help and have a lot to learn in others. And when you start from that place, there is no falling from grace, because you were never on the pedestal in the first place.

[1] https://centerforrespectfulleadership.org/leadership/being-neutral%E2%80%8B-and-how-it-backfires-a-breakdown-of-marie-forleos-apology-and-how-she-got-it-right/